Dark Days : spiced chicken, cornbread, and roasted turnips

I have to admit, I am struggling with the Dark Days Challenge at the moment. Things would be a lot easier (I tell myself) if I were eating dairy: I’m imagining turnip gratins and all kinds of quiches. However, dairy is not to be until sometime next year, so we’re making do. The Week 8 meal is not that creative, but it’s entirely representative of many of our winter meals: a favorite recipe for spiced chicken breasts, the cornbread recipe from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (adapted to use white whole wheat flour, whole grain corn meal, and rice milk), and roasted turnips and radishes (a white and green kind that is new to our CSA this year). The only new thing about this meal is that I actually ate some radishes this year, instead of just letting them wither in the crisper until they were ready to become compost!


Cornbread.


Roasted turnips and radishes.


Spiced chicken breasts.


Dinner.

Dark Days : spiced chicken, cornbread, and roasted turnips

Dark Days : venison chili

For Week 7 of the Dark Days Challenge, I relied once again on the venison in our freezer. I made chili for our meal, which was a first for me. I used: tomatoes from the freezer (grown by the wife of the person who provided the venison and processed and frozen by my mother on her early autumn visit); the sweet Italian peppers from our CSA that I packed in oil and stored in the fridge during the first week of this challenge; and some of the Garlic Fire Sauce that comes in our CSA every winter (we have an open bottle in the fridge and two in the cupboard as we are not big hot sauce people). I supplemented that local foundation with organic onions and garlic from the store, Frontier chili powder, some local honey, and two cans of Eden organic black beans. (I drooled over the beans article in the most recent issue of Organic Gardening, and am definitely going to seek out sources for local dried beans this year. In the meantime, I rely on the Michigan company that uses BPA-free cans.)


The tomatoes and peppers.


Chili pot.


Chili bowl.

The chili was really tasty: we had it for dinner and I froze a couple of containers for later. Just pretend (again) that I made cornbread to go with it.

Dark Days : venison chili

Dark Days : frittata

I was a little bit creativity-challenged for the Week 6 dinner for the Dark Days Challenge, so I made a frittata. I used the mixed kale from this week’s CSA delivery, my favorite local pastured eggs, garlic from the store, dried mushroom salt from last winter’s CSA, and shallots from our summer CSA that are still kicking around. Sauté the shallots, garlic, and greens together with olive oil; lightly beat the eggs with seasoned salt and freshly ground pepper; add the veggies to the eggs; return everything to the pan with some more olive oil; cook on the stovetop until nearly firm, and then finish off under the broiler.


Most of the ingredients.


Kales.


Greens, shallots, and garlic sautéeing.


Dinner: half a frittata each.

I had the best intentions of serving the frittata with roasted turnips and/or cornbread and/or salad greens, but I didn’t plan ahead so none of that was ready when the frittata was and I was too tired and hungry to make it happen. So we just each ate half a fritatta and called it dinner. Imagine it with roasted turnips, salad, and cornbread: I’m sure that would have been a lovely meal! As it was, the frittata was pretty darn tasty, so I’m not complaining. There’s always next time.

Dark Days : frittata

Dark Days : venison stew, Moroccan-style

One of my favorite types of meals is the one-bowl meal. Dal and rice, curry and rice, chili over baked potato: anything that can be served up as a nice hearty meal in a single bowl will do me just fine. One of our favorites is the Moroccan-style stew from Simply In Season; while we started off using ground turkey, over the past couple of years it’s become one of the ways I use our annual venison allotment. Yes, I said venison. I know that when I was growing up I would have gladly gnawed off my own arm before eating deer, and certainly never forgiven someone I knew who actually shot a deer themselves and foisted it upon me. What can I say: things change. More than just me eating meat again, what’s changed is that venison is lean and free, thanks to the generosity of my partner’s boss who is always looking for ways to share the bounty (and not piss off his own partner by filling up their freezer with too much deer). In the past we’ve taken maybe ten pounds of ground venison at most over the course of a season and used it in the Christmas pies and a few batches of this stew. This year I said I could take about forty pounds, since I now have a chest freezer. Expecting a bunch of vacuum-packed lumps of meat, I was fairly disconcerted to be presented with a sack of ground meat held closed with a binder clip. I dutifully packed it away into quart-sized freezer bags, and then did it again the next day with the second sack. I tried to just be thankful I wasn’t the one to have to carry it on the metro and move on. Thank goodness for latex gloves!


The venison as it arrived at our house.

Since all of our greens went bad last week, I was a bit stymied for the Week 5 meal for the Dark Days Challenge, and decided to fall back on this stew, which is something of a staple here. I figure you don’t get much more local than deer shot by someone you know and transported in a sack via light rail, right? I also had turnips and stewed tomatoes from our CSA and was willing to have a sweet potato (Japanese purple variety) stand in for a potato. Everything else is not local (although the canned beans are Eden brand which is local to Michigan which is where I used to live, so that kind of sort of qualifies). And, I already had the ingredients in my house, and using up things already in the pantry is fairly sustainable. (I know, it’s a stretch: I will do better next week.)


Vegetables for the stew, sweet potato not included.


The last of the summer’s tomatoes from the freezer.


The stew stewing, minus chickpeas and raisins.

The stew was really good, and the sweet potato added a funny (in a good way) flavor. It was a sweet juicy little surprise lurking in the savory stew; I think the potato is better in terms of the integrity of the overall dish, but the sweet potato was yummy and I’ll gladly use one again if that’s all I have on hand. I look forward to the best part of one dish meals (since we do have a dishwasher): having it for lunch again the next day!


Week 5: venison stew dinner.

Dark Days : venison stew, Moroccan-style

food : taking stock of the fridge


One week of greens, before they all go bad from neglect.

Between the holidays (those would be my birthday and Christmas, of course) and a sick baby, produce piled up in the fridge and we lost all of the greens. Thankfully we have a composter, so they don’t go totally to waste when that happens; as with the fallen cakes and partly flourless cookies, I fear that keeping up with the CSA will be another thing that falls victim to the needs of the new little person in the house. Of course, not having any greens put the kibosh on my plan to make a greens fritatta for this week’s Dark Days Challenge meal. I am going to fall back on a favorite (Moroccan-style venison stew) and draw upon the freezer reserves in order to use what we do have.

The rest of what I have in the fridge is (until Thursday) is now:

  • sweet potatoes (still three varieties, and not really in the fridge)
  • one acorn squash
  • shallots (I am planning to just buy some probably-not-local green beans to go with these, honestly)
  • radishes (which I don’t like at all)
  • sai sai (which is a sort of big radish thing that I am struggling to come up with a use for)
  • turnips
  • two leeks
  • apples
  • lemons and an orange
  • carrots

food : taking stock of the fridge